Foot and mouth: the biggest lie of all

All last week, Labour peddled the tale of farmers deliberately infecting their flocks for cash. For their part, farmers insist that the Government is merely trying to divert attention from its failure to eradicate the disease. David Harrison investigates

12:01AM BST 05 Aug 2001

NUALA PRESTON was relaxing with her mother, Jacqueline, last Sunday at their farmhouse in Pembrokeshire when the telephone rang. It was a police officer.

He was investigating media reports that an anonymous caller had offered to sell Miss Preston a sheep infected with foot and mouth for £2,000, so that she could introduce the disease to her own flock.

Miss Preston, 41, told the officer that the man had a "neutral" accent and "sounded like a salesman". His "product" would have increased the value of Miss Preston's 45 sheep from as little as £450 to £4,050: farmers receive £90 compensation for each infected sheep, compared with only £10-£20 at slaughter for a healthy one.

But, far from being tempted, she was "amazed and horrified" and told the mystery caller, in no uncertain terms, to go away.

But what most surprised Miss Preston was that the call from the police came four weeks after the "salesman" had rung her. She had reported the incident to the rural affairs ministry at the time, but was told not to bother informing the police because there was "no evidence".

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"I was shocked and deflated by the ministry's attitude, because there had been rumours that this was happening," she told The Telegraph. "I thought it was a serious issue because so far we have not had foot and mouth around here."

Last week, however, as foot and mouth flared up again and farmers grew angry about leaked "lies" over the cost of the clean-up, the ministry suddenly became very interested in Miss Preston's "salesman".

The story ran on the front page of a Sunday broadsheet newspaper sympathetic to New Labour, supported by quotes from ministers.

By the following morning, Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), had ordered an "investigation" into claims that farmers were deliberately infecting animals to claim compensation far above their animals' market value.

Elliott Morley, the junior rural affairs minister, raised the temperature by saying that his department had been inundated with such allegations.

A senior ministry official added gravely: "We have a duty to investigate these allegations. There now seems to be a real suspicion that some farms have been deliberately infected."

What began as a claim by one named farmer that she had been offered - and refused - money to infect her sheep had been turned into a clear suggestion that other farmers had been made similar offers - some of which had been taken up.

The implicit message was clear: farmers were money-grabbing cheats. The anti-farmers headlines spread as fast as the virulent disease that has led to the slaughter of 3,648,200 animals.

Yet, by last night, Mrs Beckett's "investigation" had produced precisely nothing. Nor had the police found anything. There is no evidence that a single farm has been deliberately infected.

Ministry officials are now backing away from the furore they created, claiming that there was never a specific investigation, but that they would look into any individual incidents drawn to their attention.

Officials examined two such cases in Cumbria last week. One involved a cow's tail dumped in a field: it was found not to be infected. The second was a paper tissue covered in blood: again the test was negative. "It was probably from somebody who had a bleeding nose," said a Defra spokesman.

Unravelling the facts from the spin and counter-spin is a bit like trying to measure fog. Everything shifts and changes. Nothing is as it seems. There are, however, some useful clues.

It may be just coincidence, but Defra's delayed and dramatic reaction to the story of Miss Preston's telephone call came at the end of a week in which the foot and mouth epidemic was raging again and producing embarrassing headlines.

Ministers had initially dismissed the resurgence as the virus "bumping along the bottom" as it petered out, but the size of the "bumps" suggested the virus was once again out of control.

Last weekend, 4,000 sheep were slaughtered on the Brecon Beacons in mid-Wales. A second cull of 1,200 followed last Wednesday, with a further 40,000 at risk.

Farmers leading their lambs to slaughter pens in the area recalled bitterly Tony Blair's declaration that the Government was "in the home straight" in the fight against the disease - just in time for the election.

Farmers are convinced that Labour used the Nuala Preston story as a smear campaign to deflect attention from the foot and mouth resurgence and the Government's "lies" over the cost of the clean-up.

Defra had earlier leaked a startling figure of more than £100,000 as the bill for cleaning and disinfecting each farm. It caused an outcry and damaging comparisons were made with European countries, where the cleaning was being done at a fraction of that cost. The clean-up was halted and opprobrium was heaped on "greedy" farmers.

The farmers were furious and fought back, claiming that the cost per farm was nearer £25,000-£30,000. The leak was in danger of backfiring. The media's attention had to be drawn to something else.

Last Friday, ministers briefed selected journalists about plans to tighten "bio-security" on farms. The ministers made it clear that they blamed careless farmers for spreading the disease to previously uninfected areas, and the question of whether farmers were deliberately infecting their animals was raised.

One newspaper had something to help the ministers' anti-farming tirade: a freelance journalist in Pembrokeshire had tipped them off that a local paper had published a story about Miss Preston's telephone call.

One minister seized on the story and provided a damning quote. "Foot and mouth does not fly up the M6 against the wind," he said. "The suspicion is that some farmers are infecting their own cattle."

The story was published and followed. The Government's failure to arrest the spread of foot and mouth and the growing doubts about the clean-up leak were all but forgotten by the media.

It was small consolation to the farmers when, two days ago, the Government quietly announced that the clean-up was to be re-started. A Defra official admitted to The Telegraph that the £25,000-£30,000 figure was correct.

The £100,000 figure had included repair costs for damage to farms during the cull and inflated invoices submitted by large contractors and by a small number of farmers.

Ian Gardner, the deputy director-general of the National Farmers' Union, was furious. He accused the Government of "managing the news to cover up its failure to manage the issues".

"We are fed up with this," he said. "Farmers have got enough on their plates without having to fight a propaganda war with the Government.

"They got themselves into a quandary with cleaning and disinfectant, but they didn't admit that it was their mistake; they just tried to blame the farmers as they have done regularly during the foot and mouth crisis."

Mr Gardner said the main cause of the high cost was "a lax system of controls put in place by Maff, and followed by Defra. They didn't have properly qualified staff and reaped the fruits of that neglect.

"There were a few farmers involved, but the way the Government was talking you would think that every one of the 90,000 farms in Britain was on the fiddle," he said.

A spokesman for the Farmers' Union of Wales said: "There has been a change in the Government's attitude to farmers in the past two weeks. Now that it is clear that it is not in control of the disease, it has decided to kick the farmers to take the heat off itself."

It will probably never be known if any farmers have deliberately infected their sheep. If they have, they are unlikely to admit it.

What is known is that a number of farmers has received calls from people offering to infect their sheep for between £400 and £5,000. These calls have been made sporadically over several months, but again the Government did not act until last week.

In June, The Telegraph learnt that two farmers in Kent had received similar calls. They were outraged by the offers, but refused to speak on the record or go to the police for fear of recriminations.

One described the call: "The man at the end of the phone sounded businesslike and intelligent. He told me that he would deliver foot and mouth disease between midnight and 1am.

"He did not get the chance to say how he would get the disease on to the farm because I called him low-life scum and told him to dig a pit and bury himself."

Most farmers would probably react the same way. Farmers generally want to protect their own livestock and that of their neighbours. Any farmer found to have deliberately brought the virus into his farming community would become a pariah.

Some farmers said they feared that one or two of the more "desperate" farmers on the brink of bankruptcy could "crack" and pay the money to infect their sheep, increasing the risk of spreading the disease to neighbouring farms.

The financial incentive to claim compensation - made "generous" by the Government as an incentive to farmers to hand over infected animals for slaughter as quickly as possible - is there, even though it was modified last week.

The perverse economics of compensation also make it possible for farmers to use the compensation to buy more sheep and perhaps even reinfect them to make yet more money.

But the idea of such a transaction taking place raises more questions than answers. Would it be necessary to pay? If farmers wanted to infect their flocks, they could drive to an infected farm, walk through the fields, put their hands inside a diseased animal's mouth and take the virus back to their farms.

And would any farmer really hand over thousands of pounds to a complete stranger with no guarantee that the animal - or part of an animal - was infected?

Could the calls have simply been made by con men out to dupe a few desperate farmers? How would the con men know that, when they tried to collect the money, they would not be met by police officers, tipped off by the farmer?

Perhaps the calls were hoaxes: every disaster brings out the cranks. After the Paddington rail crash in 1999, in which 31 died and 400 were injured, strange people called the police to say that their relatives were among the victims when they were not.

Mr Gardner said it was "ludicrous" to think that "people were peddling bits of infected sheep". He said: "This is a serious crime if it's happening, but so far there is no evidence that one farmer has done it."

Privately, some other senior farming officials finger Mr Morley as the chief "spinner" against farmers. A spokesman for Defra denied that the Government was involved in a propaganda war, but the skirmishing continued all last week as the foot and mouth crisis worsened.

There were serious outbreaks of the disease in Yorkshire and the frightening possibility that the virus would spread to the east, wiping out a large part of Britain's pig industry.

On Wednesday, farmers criticised Mrs Beckett for taking a five-week break, saying it showed a "lack of urgency in combating the spread of foot and mouth".

The conflict was symbolised last Thursday, when Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister - desperate to show that the countryside was "open for business" - was refused access to a footpath by a farmer in the Lake District.

The row over vaccinating animals against foot and mouth - which many farmers favour - was revived yesterday when a University of Wales study showed that that an inoculation programme would have cost £3 billion less than the £5 billion slaughter policy.

As with the fight against the virus, the war of words between farmers and the Government is far from over. We may not even be in the home straight.